The Pinch Hitter (1917) A Silent Film Review

Charles Ray is a country boy from rural Vermont who gets to attend college thanks to his late mother’s final request. Teased for his unpolished ways, he joins the baseball team as their mascot. But when all the batters are injured at the big game, will our country boy prove himself?

Hey batter, batter, batter, batter!

There’s stiff competition, alas, but Charles Ray has a pretty good claim to the title of Huge Film Star You’ve Never Heard Of. Enormously popular during his heyday, he infamously sank his personal fortune into an expensive flop and his career never fully recovered. In 1917, though, Ray was at the top of the movie world, one of the stars (along with William S. Hart) who followed producer Thomas Ince from Triangle to Inceville (distributed by Paramount). The Pinch Hitter was made under Ince’s supervision before he parted ways with Triangle.

Like Ray’s 1919 film The Busher, The Pinch Hitter is all about a young fellow making a name for himself in baseball. Unlike The Busher, there are no young John Gilbert and young Colleen Moore in supporting roles; this film must be carried by Ray alone.

Our country boy.

Joel Parker (Charles Ray) has been told since childhood that he is useless and will never amount to anything. If you hear something enough, you start to believe it and so Joel has zero self-confidence. His horrible father, Obediah Parker (J.J. Dowling), would be content to keep his only child on the farm and under his emotionally abusive thumb forever but his late wife made him promise he would send the boy to college. Pa Parker informs Joel that he’ll probably fail anyway and he’ll have money for tuition and board and THAT IS IT.

Thanks, dad.

Once on campus, Joel is immediately targeted by the school bullies and the one bright spot is Abbie Nettleton (Sylvia Breamer), the waitress at one of the college restaurants. She like Joel but knows that he has the look of a loser and desperately needs an injection of confidence if he is going to survive college.

Despite the title, this does not really become a sports movie until midway through the picture when Joel is allowed to join the college team as their mascot. (He was too nervous at his tryouts and though he really is a good player, he doesn’t show well.) But it’s no spoiler to say that most of us know exactly how this picture will end. (Classic sports pictures can end only one of two ways: victory for the underdog or a victorious defeat that includes a slow clap from those mean people who doubted them.)

No.

The biggest question in this film is Charles Ray. How is he? For the most part, pretty good. He does oversell his mourning for his mother (“Stop snogging the photograph, Charles.”) but generally does an excellent job of portraying the terrible toll of emotional abuse. A tall man, Ray curls into himself and can barely lift his shoulders, especially when something happens that seems to confirm his father’s cruel words.

The film does let his father off the hook, in my opinion, because the man shouldn’t have been allowed to raise a tank of Sea Monkeys, let alone a live human boy. But then again, this is a light entertainment from 1917 and was never intended as a study of the psychological effects of emotional abuse.

Hit a home run and all emotional abuse is cured!

Sylvia Breamer does okay as Abbie but she does emote a bit. Also, I understand that Joel has basically been emotionally beaten to a jelly but I really would have liked a scene in which he stands up for Abbie against all obstacles. (Without giving too much away, he does profess his love but nobody really tries to stop him when he does it.)

The rest of the cast is okay and the film proves that rich and snotty college kids have always been the perfect movie villains and they will likely continue to be. Okay, okay, so the actors playing these “kids” look thirty-five or thereabouts. That’s a proud movie tradition too.

Will the likable underdog help win the game? I’m dying of suspense.

The plot is pretty predictable—if you’ve seen one sports movie you’ve seen them all—but I should also note that the version I saw only ran for about 47 minutes (the original was five reels, which likely ran for about an hour) and there are clearly some missing sequences. Whether or not these lost scenes would have made the picture smoother, I have no way of knowing. I was still able to follow the plot well enough but there were some clear gaps.

Director Victor Schertzinger does a decent job with the material and even includes a few flourishes like using an opening farmyard gate to signal the opening of the film and employing animation to illustrate the scores of the climactic ball game. He went on to direct pictures like The Fleet’s In, The Mikado and a couple of the Cosby/Hope Road films but he’s probably best remembered today for writing the jazz standard Tangerine.

Boys, you’re fighting so that Charles Ray can ask waitresses out for ice cream sodas!

But now let’s discuss the overall tone of the picture. It’s easy to see why Charles Ray would be so appealing to 1910s audiences. The world was going to hell in a handbasket and then after the war, everyone was licking their wounds and trying to pick up the pieces. Ray’s bucolic films pushed all the right Americana buttons and the ease with which his onscreen problems were solved was a feature, not a bug. In short, audiences wanted low stakes and a likable kid to spend the evening with.

In all fairness, I do want a free coffee grinder.

I should note, though, that while Ray did specialize in rural pictures with titles like The Clodhopper, String Beans and The Egg Crate Wallop, he branched into other genres as well. His resume includes propaganda (In the Claws of the Hun), historical drama (The Deserter, The Coward) and assorted millionaires-in-disguise pictures (and they always fall for the shop girl).

The audience and this collie just want to see Charles Ray succeed at college!

Still, Ray is remembered for two things: his rural pictures and his self-financed flop, The Courtship of Miles Standish. The latter is missing and presumed lost but we have several excellent examples of the former. I would say that The Pinch Hitter is successful for what it is. The film sets out to be an unpretentious, feel-good picture with the college and the sports and the romance that you people seem to love. That’s exactly what it delivers. There’s something to be said for that.

8 Replies to “The Pinch Hitter (1917) A Silent Film Review”

I like this film, as I’ve liked every Charles Ray movie I’ve ever seen. Just playing a likable character type for me, I guess 🙂

Can’t help but speculate as to why Miles Standish was such a huge flop for Ray, and, alas, not much of a way to judge without at least a couple of reels or partials turning up somewhere. Too long, too slow, too pretentious, too wordy, too boring, too “not-The-Busher”……? I think I may vote (in the absence of any footage to judge from) for the last possibility there.

As for Miles Standish’ status as “lost,” I just recalled that old (and no small doubt apocryphal) story about the 1928 Noah’s Ark: the box office was so wretched compared to the amount of dough sunk into the production that Zanuck proposed recalling all the distribution reels so they could be cut up and sold as mandolin picks! Hmmmm…… 😉

Oh yes, it’s impossible to say exactly why the film didn’t click with audiences but I have read that some audiences found it to be too polite and and in awe of its source material. Of course, The Canadian was written off as a dull and dismal and look at that little beauty. I do hold out hope that somebody will find a copy in the Czech archives or something.

I simply meant that sports movies have an enormous share of tropes and, let’s face it, they do. (Rocky does indeed have a victorious defeat and Field of Dreams put me to sleep so I can’t possibly comment.) People do sports, they win or lose, the end. It’s not a genre that speaks to me. (Wait until you hear what I have to say about Slice of Life and Coming of Age!)

I thought this was a good picture for what it was – if I had to describe it in one sentence, I’d say it was like The Freshman with all the funny parts removed (yes, I know The Freshman came out much later, but it’s a good description nonetheless). Prior to this and The Busher, the only film I’d seen Ray in was The Garden of Eden, and I thought he was the one of the most inept romantic leads I’d ever seen. Until I did some research, I didn’t know he specialized in rural pictures, and it does suit him better.

And at least you got to sleep through Field of Dreams. My mom made me watch it, and I didn’t want to hurt her feelings by drifting off.

Yeah, Ray was best in rural roles and he simply aged out of them, which left him in a bit of a pickle. Richard Barthelmess was able to keep up the boyish thing much longer but he was also a more versatile performer.

Fortunately, my parents were pretty understanding about Field of Dreams. My mother wandered off and my father finished it out of a sense of duty. (A well-meaning friend kept lending him copies of those critically-acclaimed-but-tedious pictures from the 1980s. You know, The Last Emperor, Driving Miss Daisy, etc. It turned “critically acclaimed” into a badge of boredom until I realized that it was actually just a phase and movies did get better.)

Movie Book Pick of the Week

Styling the Stars: Lost Treasures from the Twentieth Century Fox Archive by Angela Cartwright and Tom McLaren. A lavish look at the fashions of Fox. It’s pretty much talkies but absolutely gorgeous to look at.

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